Winnipeg no longer the Windy City
by Robert LaFrance
You know those weather ‘events’ that blow down trees and flatten barns but aren’t called tornadoes? My friend Flug got caught in one on Thursday, June 9 – just to pin down the date in case you look at a weather map or were caught in the same one. If you were, that guy flying by in the red jacket with green trim around the collar – that was Flug.
“I kinda got caught out in the rain, like that cake in the ‘McArthur Park’ song,” he recounted ruefully. We were sitting in the club on June 10. You could tell by the production line of 'lemonade' that Flug was still upset at the experience. “I went fishing in a little brook that runs into Larlee Creek, and I was up in the hills a LONG ways.” He stretched out his long arms to illustrate this and knocked over three glasses of lemonade that had been sitting two tables over, not to mention the three little old ladies who had been sipping and listening.
“All of a sudden,” he continued, after he had replaced the lost lemonade and ordered three more for himself, “it started thundering, and the lightning was like being at an Alice Cooper rock concert (don’t ask). I just got out of the way before a big fir tree landed on the ground beside me. Then there was this big roar like Maggie’s Falls on steroids and I started flying through the air. It reminded me of the Sixties in Gastown (don’t ask).” He took a big drink of his lemonade.
“Well, I fetched up solid on the roof of that big barn just below the hospital in Perth, which was weird, because the wind was coming from the other side of the river. I felt myself sliding off the roof and was sure I would break every bone in my body, but then an even bigger gust came up and kind of pinned me to the side of the barn. I slud down to the ground and just laid there full of wood slivers like that time I fell off the stage at the Stones’ concert in ’68 in Ottawa.” Don’t ask, and, by the way, he really said ‘slud’.
That really was quite a storm. I’ve seen horizontal rain quite a few times, but that June 9 episode really took the cake, as it were, out in the rain. I was sitting in the cafeteria of Perth-Andover Middle School and waiting to be served some pasta, when the heaviest rain and pyrotechnics (as they say) began. Then I saw my wife out in the parking lot and in the midst of the tempest. She was carrying a couple of bags of something, trying to make her way into the school. At that point, had I been any kind of a husband, I would have gone out into the storm to try and help her, but just then my pasta arrived and I couldn’t let it get cold. While I have often said I would climb the highest river or swim the deepest mountain for her, I never said nothin’ about no thunderstorm.
Someone asked me yesterday if I had later received the rolling pin treatment; was I forced to sleep in the garage for a week? “Don’t ask,” I said, nervously rubbing my still tender cranium.
Going from the subject of storms to people who should be left out in the rain, there seem to be more and more bad drivers on the road every day, to the point where government grants are now available to study them. A group of behavioural psychologists, neurologists, and a few other ‘ists’ have set up a clinic to test people who habitually tailgate, drive through the fog without headlights, and always drive too fast for conditions.
The tail-gaters were tested first. The ‘ists’ used brain scanners, neuro-transmission detectors, and the like, all too technical for
this simple country boy to describe. None of the subjects had any measurable brain function. Indeed, the tail-gaters were on the minus side. None of the electronic devices could detect even so much as one gamma ray in the brains of these individuals, proving finally that bad drivers aren’t bad people; they’re just morons.
And then there are the morons who try and enhance that condition by the addition of alcohol. I’ve done it myself, in my young and stupid days, but that was many decades ago and I drove a Falcon (named Hitler), top speed 43 mph downhill in a high tailwind. When I think of that car, I wonder just how far that June 9 uber-wind would have thrown it. Given that it was rarely out of the repair garage, probably not far.
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